Guillemots

One of the best names in modern music, Fyfe Dangerfield, and his band, Guillemots, impress in parts on record but really impress on stage.

Date: June 3, 2008

Venue: Rock City

There are few bands as interesting as the Guillemots. Able to emit beauty as well as bewilderment in the time it takes to stop sniggering at lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield’s quite wonderful name, they ply a heady mix that excites and confuses in equal measures.

There are melodies that plunge where you’d expect them to clamber, there are weird noises by virtue of long forgotten instruments, there are grooves, there are elegiac ballads, and there’s the way in which your toe-to-floor tapping rhythm is severely disrupted by such oddities as Last Kiss – essentially a kaleidoscopic new-rave Belle & Sebastian.

Latest album Red was not without its calamities but their eccentric and often erratic live makeovers offer them a far better podium than the CD.

They start, though, with 2006 favourite Made Up Love Song #43. With its forlorn sentiments and oscillating melody it’s the perfect introduction. From that same era we get the crunching Trains To Brazil, while recent hit Get Over It throbs with electricity and Falling Out Of Reach will have Daniel Bedingfield scampering through his back catalogue in search of a missing pop diamond.

Often brilliant, always entertaining, Guillemots are the epitome of the old adage ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’.